Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.

I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs. The guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies.

There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please watch our entire interview and think again. Matt had an early start with his first Mac product interactions at age three. When asked as a child growing up in Gainesville Florida what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond, “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon he agreed to basically do anything (anything being to help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied for an intership at Apple via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project.” Seven days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? Apple awarded him a cash bonus as an intern, something VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder Tony Fadell said, “He had never done before.”

Apple

After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt said this, ”Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five years.”

In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “Purple.” At the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It wasn’t good enough so they started again.  The next version was the one Steve Jobs would unveil on stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that, 25-members of the team went to China to assemble each of the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into a day and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day.

The Founding of Nest

After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on products like iPod nano and shuffle, parts of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. By late 2009 he had hired 40 people and managed these teams while still just in his twenties. That fall he had a two-hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to buy a smart home. They’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.”

Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder relationship stemming from Matt’s early internship days at Apple. “We think very much alike, to the point where we complete each other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without him.”

But was this the idea to risk his promising future at Apple? Matt had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in a few short years. “The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go start. We could save 10 percent of energy, solve an epic problem, no innovation (in the industry), multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?”

Matt quit his job in spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and tell them, “Will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy. Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt assured me no one got divorced adding, “All the wives are happy now.”

Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that (Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date – I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.”

Even with limited funding Nest still managing to assemble a killer engineering team in the midst of a talent war exploding all across Silicon Valley. “It was a mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience. Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I think I was the youngest.”

A year after raising Series A capital from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed, and Shasta, they shipped their first product. This past spring Nest was rumored to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000 thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 now has 200 employees, and selling its products at Lowe’s, Apple Stores, and Best Buy. About half their inventory is sold online. Like most great companies in the Valley it is not without controversy. They were recently sued by Honeywell for patient infringement and as one friend in the home automation industry recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently acquired venture backed energy dashboard MyEnergy.

Building HARD-ware

Nest shipped its first product 18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent $10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own is that there is no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities hat, and janitor hat. Doesn’t matter, you have do it.”

Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in these additional complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.”

When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described working a holiday a few years previously. ”That’s what it takes,” he casually said.

Apple faces a whole lot of inbound requests to unlock iPhone devices from law enforcement officials, according to a new report from CNET. Seized iPhones with a passcode lock are apparently secure enough to frustrate a lot of police agencies in the U.S., resulting in a wait list that Apple has put in place to help it deal with unlock requests from the authorities.

The waiting list was long enough that it resulted in a 7-week delay for a recent request by the ATF last summer, according to the CNET report. The good news for iPhone owners is that the ATF in that instance turned to Apple as a last resort, after trying to find a law enforcement body at either the local, state or federal level that had the capability to unlock the phone in-house for three months to no avail. The bad news is that an affidavit obtained by CNET, the decryptions seem to take place without necessarily requiring a customer’s knowledge, whereas with Google there’s a password reset involved that notifies a user via email of the unlock.

Apple can reportedly bypass the security lock to get access to data on a phone, download it to an external device and hand that over to the authorities, according to an ATF affidavit, which means that ultimately, the information on an iOS device isn’t 100 percent secure. But overall, repeated reports peg Apple devices as particularly resistant to prying eyes operating in law enforcement.

A previous report from CNET also identified iMessage as resilient in the face of outside surveillance attempts, especially compared to more common text communication methods like SMS. Combined, the reports suggest that Apple’s technology for its mobile devices is especially good at repelling unwanted advances, which is great for privacy buffs, though the policies around when and why Apple does share that information needs more fleshing out.

We’ve reached out to Apple to see if they have any official comment on the unlock queue from law enforcement and how they proceed with requests, and will update if we hear more.

Once again, news from a supplier is fueling rumors about Apple’s future product roster. This time it’s manufacturer Pegatron’s announcement that it will increase its number of workers in China by up to 40 percent in the second half of this year. The hiring blitz at the company, which produces iOS devices, has led to new round of speculation that a cheaper iPhone is in the works.

Suppliers have told Reuters that Apple is developing a cheaper iPhone in order to target emerging markets such as China and India. The less expensive version of the smartphone is expected to launch by the third quarter.

Pegatron’s financial performance is closely tied to the Apple products it makes. Just yesterday the company forecast its biggest drop in consumer electronics revenue in six quarters due to falling demand for the iPad Mini. Pegatron said its second quarter revenue will decrease 25 percent to 30 percent from the previous three months.

Other signs that Pegatron is expecting orders for a cheaper iPhone is chief financial officer Charles Lin’s disclosure that more than 60 percent of the company’s 2013 revenue will come from the second half of the year. Pegatron president and chief executive officer Jason Cheng said earlier this week that revenue from communication products will contribute up to 40 percent to the total in second half of 2013, compared to 24 percent in the first quarter.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that the Cupertino company will start rolling out new products this fall and throughout 2014, including devices in “exciting new product categories.” Though its unclear exactly what Apple will be unleashing in a few months, many analysts believe that it will launch a cheaper iPhone instead of a larger-sized “phablet” that would compete with Samsung’s Galaxy Note.

A less expensive handset will allow Apple to compete with cheaper devices running on Android in emerging markets, but analysts’ opinions on how much of an effect a less pricey iPhone would have on Apple’s earnings vary widely. The company posted its first year-over-year earnings decline since 2003 in the second quarter, reporting $43.6 billion in revenue (up from $39.2 billion in the year-ago quarter) along with $9.5 billion in quarterly net profit.

Enders Analysis’ Benedict Evans said “a blockbuster new Apple phone that almost doubles unit sales and blows a hole in the middle of the Android market might only add 5 percent to Apple’s gross profits.”

On the other hand, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty believes a cheaper version can potentially add another 20 percent to the 10 percent market share iPhone currently holds in China. “Even in a scenario of low 40 percent gross margin and 1/3 iPhone cannibalization rate (flattening legacy iPhone shipment growth, which we view as conservative, the iPhone Mini adds incremental revenue and gross profit dollars,” she wrote in a recent investors note.

Google Glass is finding its way to developers and others and the reaction has been, well, predictable.

So far, there are those who think that Glass will absolutely change the world, that it’s our version of the flying car. Those people are full of shit. On the other side of the coin, there are those who say that Glass will never find a place in the hearts of consumers, that it’s unnecessary and that Google is just trying to be cool. Those people are also full of shit.

The problem is that when new things are introduced, people don’t know how to react, so they go to what they know. There’s either delirious glee or there’s immediate doom and gloom. The fact of the matter is that nobody knows what the future of Glass looks like. Not even Google. This is the very reason why the device was seeded with developers first: Their applications will be what makes the product interesting or not. If iPhone developers had been the only ones with an iPhone, then they would have been called names, too. It’s just the nature of the tech beast.

I was around for the launch of the iPhone, the device that some, including Steve Jobs, said would revolutionize the way we do everything. For the most part, it has in many ways. When it launched, I remember handing my precious cellular device to people who couldn’t wait to take it for a spin. They spent about five minutes tapping around and then handed it back, saying things like “Oh, well I guess that’s cool.” It wasn’t until the App Store was introduced until the real power of the iPhone came into play. Surfing the web, checking stock and weather information and reading your email wasn’t all that amazing and magical.

Here’s CNET’s “Bottom Line” on the original iPhone in 2007:

Despite some important missing features, a slow data network, and call quality that doesn’t always deliver, the Apple iPhone sets a new benchmark for an integrated cell phone and MP3 player.

Is that how you’d explain the iPhone now? Not really.

Then, you had this wonderful moment…

During that clip, Steve Ballmer showed himself to lack the vision to even think about creating a device that could unlock the potential of so many different people, be it developers or consumers. That’s exactly the reaction I’m seeing on the doom-and-gloom side of the coin for Glass.

Just today, Business Insider wrote “The Verdict Is In: Nobody Likes Google Glass.” There were some fair points raised in that piece, but like most things that have been written about Glass, the broader points are being missed. What will Glass do for developers who are looking to stretch their brains, and talents, on a platform that could be on the face of consumers in the next year or so? It’s too early to tell, of course.

There will be a killer app for Glass, mark my words. I have no idea what it will be. There was a killer app for the iPhone very early on, one called Urbanspoon. Get this, you could shake your phone and you’d get a random suggestion on where to eat. That action and experience could never be done on a phone until the iPhone. You’re going to see the same types of applications pop up for Glass, ones that we’ve never imagined.

Until these apps start being built, we’re stuck with people trying to get attention by wearing the device in the shower and swearing to never take them off, or people trying to predict how it will completely bomb and never see store shelves at all. It’s a time that we went through once before, with the iPhone. Apple stayed the course, navigated its way through those bumpy times and came out on the other side. Will Google be able to do the same? There’s no reason to think they can’t, and there’s no reason to think they can.

We’re just going to have to wait.

If you haven’t noticed, waiting isn’t a strong suit of those in the tech space. However, Ballmer should have waited until he shared his opinion on the iPhone publicly, but then again…it was pretty predictable.

To use text messaging and navigation on Google Glass, users currently have to pair it with an Android phone and install the Glass companion app on their phones. This will change very soon, however, one of the Google representatives in its New York office told me when I picked up my own unit yesterday afternoon. Glass, the Google employee told me, will soon be able to handle these features independent of the device the user has paired it to (and maybe even independent of the Glass companion app).

While Glass will happily work with any iPhone over Bluetooth or use any Wi-Fi connection to get online, iPhone users are currently unable to get turn-by-turn directions through Glass – one of its killer features. Those direction are pretty useful while you are navigating a new city and they do show off the power of location-based apps on Glass, but the software will currently balk if you ask it to give you directions while it’s connected to an iPhone.

In this context, it’s worth noting that one of the myths surrounding Glass is that it is independently connected to the Internet. That’s not true, however. Instead, Glass users need to have a tethering plan for their phones to connect Glass to the Internet. In the eyes of your wireless provider, Glass is just another device that uses your phone’s personal hotspot feature. This means Glass shouldn’t have to depend on any application that runs on your phone, so the original restriction of making navigation and SMS dependent on the companion app was always a bit odd.

While Glass has a built-in compass, it doesn’t have its own GPS receiver and depends on the phone to provide it with location data. It looks like this was just a function of the beta state of Glass, however, and that we can expect it to soon be fully functional, no matter the device it uses to connect to the Internet.

Since graduating from Y Combinator in 2012, Grouper has been on a mission to help busy, overworked young people get away from the glow of computer screens and out into the real world to meet new people. To do that, the startup sends its members on “Groupers,” which are essentially blind, group dates between two groups of friends, designed to take the awkwardness out of one-on-one dating.

Eager to avoid being seen as another dating site, the startup instead wants to appeal to younger generations who prefer casual meetups over drinks at a local bar to traditional “dinner-and-a-movie” dates. Since launch, the service has expanded into 20 U.S. cities, and members have shared hundreds of thousands of drinks. Up until now, Grouper has existed exclusively on the Web, but today the startup is looking to take its offline social network to the next level by bringing Groupers to the iPhone.

“Grouper has always made more sense from a phone,” says founder and CEO Michael Waxman. “As a device, it has the ability to get out of your way and let you enjoy the real world, which is what we think Grouper is all about.” To make the dating experience more manageable, Grouper allows anyone to sign up, choose two friends who are up for a blind date, and pre-pay for a round of drinks at a local bar.

The service then matches your trio with another group of three — for now, three guys and three girls — using your application, Facebook info, algorithms and some human curation to match you with a cool date. No profile creation required.

On its web service, members have been able to tell the service when they want to go on a Grouper, and the startup will take care of everything else, including choosing the location, making the reservation and paying for the first round of drinks. If the date is a bust, members are only roped into one round of drinks and can make a move for the exit thereafter. If it goes well, they can pay for a second round themselves, or head to a new location.

While this makes the experience more casual and takes the hassle out of planning, it still requires users to plan in advance. That is the biggest selling point of Grouper’s new iPhone app, which, besides streamlining the process for mobile, now allows members to schedule Groupers on-demand. Starting this week and rolling out over the next few months, members will be able to organize Groupers on-demand, in under an hour.

Inspired by other apps that act like a remote control for real life, like Uber, Waxman says, on-demand Groupers allow users to tap a button, get matched with three new people they’ve never met and schedule a Grouper the same night. The iPhone app comes with a mobile concierge service, so that members can message back-and-forth with the group who makes the reservations. It also automatically sends a confirmation email to both parties.

Another cool feature is that Grouper connects to your Instagram account so that you can snap pics while you’re out on your date, which are automatically pinned on a map by location so that users can tap through, checking out Grouper’s candid date shots. At the end of the date, like Lyft or Uber, the app asks members to rate their experience.

However, unlike the traditional “four star” approach, users can rate their Groupers on a sliding scale. If the date went horribly, it will automatically ping the startup’s customer service team so that they can try to help resolve the issue and take steps to make sure the issue doesn’t happen again.

Going forward, Waxman says that Grouper will look to add other integrations that complement its mobile experience, like being able to order an Uber to take your group to and from the date. While he wouldn’t specify, Foursquare or Yelp integration would jive with its mobile strategy, allowing users to view recommendations on nearby restaurants, bars and attractions.

Waxmans says that, while features like allowing those already in relationships to organize double dates are on the long-term map, in the near-term they will be focusing on additions that make the current mobile experience better and easier. Plus, anything that Grouper can do to add value for its 400 partner bars will be a win over the long-run and make city-wide expansion easier as it scales.

Because the on-demand feature is just launching today, I haven’t had a chance to test it live and thus can’t vouch for it, but having seen a demo, it looks great and does make a lot more sense in terms of user experience for what the company wants to be strategically over the long haul.

Check it out for yourself here.

Sprint’s Q1 2013 financial results came out this morning, and the news wasn’t great overall. Losses continue to accumulate, and total smartphone sales aren’t faring very well, either, with just 5 million units sold in total. The iPhone, after achieving a record high of 2.2 million handsets sold on Sprint’s network last quarter, dropped back down to 1.5 million, the same number Sprint saw in the three quarters preceding Q4 2012.

This is the first time Sprint has reported specific total smartphone sales in an earnings release, and it said it achieved 5 million handset sales in total. that means that the iPhone accounted for 30 percent of total device sales at the carrier. iPhone sales for all of 2012 totaled 6.6 million, on total smartphone sales for the year of 20 million, which means Apple’s devices accounted for just about one-third of the total. That puts this quarter pretty close to on pace, but compared to the rest of the field, iPhone growth was flat at Sprint.

Horace Dediu of Asymco notes that iPhone sales grew 25 percent at Verizon, and by around 12 percent at AT&T. Worldwide, the pace was a 7 percent increase, with 14 percent improvement at home. It might be tempting to put some of the blame for Sprint’s flagging fortunes on a big bet on iPhone, but the numbers indicate the carrier isn’t being hurt so much by flagging iPhone sales, but by a general inability to match its competitors, in terms of device sales aside.

iPhone sales grew 25% at Verizon, 12% at AT&T and 0% at Sprint. Overall US growth was 14% vs. 7% globally.—
Horace Dediu (@asymco) April 24, 2013

Sprint is still quick to note that the iPhone is driving new customers to its business, pointing out that the rate of new subscribers signing up via iPhone purchases is once again at over 40 percent, the same as over the past several quarters. The iPhone has been consistent for it, but the company was likely hoping it would be more of a breakout hit.

Apple has just released its Q2 2013 earnings report, announcing sales of 37.4 million iPhones in the quarter ending March. Apple also reported 19.5 million iPad units sold, which shows incredibly strong growth for Apple’s tablet business.

This is a slight decrease from last quarter, which included a holiday sales spike and being the first full quarter in which the iPhone 5 was available.

In terms of iPhones, this quarter’s 37.4 million represents 7 percent YOY growth; however it’s down 22 percent from last quarter. Where iPads are concerned, we’re seeing an 18 percent decline from last quarter, yet the segment remains strong. It’s grown 65 percent from last year’s 11.8 million from the same quarter.

Moreover, this is the iPad’s second-best quarter ever, losing out only to last quarter. It’s also the best non-holiday quarter the iPad has ever seen.

The iPhone numbers here aren’t all that surprising. Tim Cook has said before (and Steve Jobs before him) that expectations for the next-gen iPhone always tend to slow sales of the current model ahead of launch. Since we expect to see the next iPhone in June, it would make sense for sales to slow a bit.

Last quarter, Apple sold a whopping 47.8 million iPhones and 22.9 million iPads, both of which broke previous records. In other words, this latest report shows continued growth for the iDevice segment.

Apple doesn’t break out specific device numbers, so it’s hard to tell which models perform best. However, it seems that the introduction of the iPad mini has most certainly boosted sales for Apple’s tablet division, as many have been holding out for a smaller tablet from Apple since the iPad first launched.

The Infinity Cell is a kinetic charger for the iPhone that uses your body’s movement to generate electricity. The current prototype for the Infinity Cell is a crude 3D printed rectangle, roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes, linked up to the iPhone with a cable. The plan is to create a more streamlined version during the product’s Kickstarter campaign.

When you shake the Infinity Cell for 30 minutes, that provides enough power to give the iPhone a 20 percent charge. When you shake the Infinity Cell for three hours, that provides enough power to fully charge the iPhone. Of course, no sane person is going to sit around shaking his iPhone for three hours to grab a charge. The Infinity Cell eventually aims to generate power from the slightest bit of movement.

The finished model will resemble a Mophie or MaxBoost battery case. You simply slip your iPhone into the case, put in your pocket, and the movement you create when you’re walking, jogging, or biking will power your iPhone. They’re also planning on releasing an Infinity Cell iOS app that will track your energy saving, carbon offset, and gamify the experience by granting users badges as they reach different energy saving rankings.

The creators of Infinity Cell are seeking to raise $155,000 on Kickstarter by June 6th. A $125 contribution will nab you an Infinity Cell of your own, although it’s only compatible with iPhone 4 and 4S for now.

Opera has just put out its latest State of Mobile Advertising report for Q1 2013 and its findings put the iPhone back on top for “impression volume” (i.e. generating the most traffic to mobile ads), regaining its lead over Android. iOS also maintains its top position for monetisation compared to the other mobile platforms.

Opera draws its data from its mobile advertising platform business, which consists of AdMarvel, Mobile Theory, 4^th Screen Advertising and Opera Mediaworks Performance. The platform serves 50+ billion ad impressions per month via 12,000 mobile sites and apps.

Mobile ad campaigns running on Apple devices “consistently achieve the highest average eCPMs”, according to Opera’s findings, and account for nearly half (49.23%) of all revenue delivered to mobile publishers.

In addition, Opera’s data shows that the iPhone edged out Android phones in ad impression volume in Q1, having temporarily lost the number one position at the end of 2012. Add in ad impressions and clicks on the iPad and iOS has a clear lead over Android, with 44.53% of the ad traffic and 49.23% of the revenue vs 31.26% of the ad traffic and 26.72% of the revenue.

Here’s Opera’s full breakdown of ad traffic and revenue share by mobile OS:

Across all of its ad platforms, Opera said the U.S. continues to drive the majority of ad requests but notes that this lead is shrinking as other regions see faster rates of growth. The U.S. still generates the most revenue (75.4%) across Opera’s platform, even with diminished impression volume (50.7% vs. 60% last quarter).

Opera’s report flags up especially accelerated ad request growth in Europe, with the European market now generating more than 21% of ad requests, up from 14.61% in the previous quarter.

It said the majority (65%) of European ad traffic originates in five key markets: the U.K., Italy, Germany, France and Spain.

Verizon said today on its earnings conference call that it had activated 4 million total iPhones during Q1 2013, of which half were LTE devices, and half were 3G-only. That means 50 percent, or around 2 million were iPhone 5, with the remaining 2 million making up iPhone 4 and 4S devices.

iPhones represented a little over half of its total smartphone sales for the quarter, or 55.6 percent. Verizon activated 7.2 million smartphones in total in Q1 2013, and 5.9 million LTE devices, which means iPhones accounted for around one-third of all LTE device sales at the carrier during the three-month period.

Last quarter iPhone represented 64 percent of all smartphone sales by comparison, with 6.2M devices sold. As with this quarter, around half of those were iPhone 5, with older models making up the rest. The dip is mostly in keeping with past iPhone sales performance at the carrier, though it likely was higher last quarter due to strong interest in the still newly-launched iPhone 5 heading into the holiday shopping season.

The decrease in share of total smartphone sales is consistent with past performance, but it’s worth watching those numbers over the next couple of quarters as new flagship Android devices like the Galaxy S4 make their way to market. And if Apple is indeed planning an iPhone revision in June as many now expect, we could see more changes, though based on current data it looks like iPhone sales share might be settling in to a regular pattern, at lest at Verizon.

Ah. Remember the good ol’ days of the Internet? When the only fakes we had to worry about were the images and the people? Video was like a safe haven. Sure, there’d be some shakycam footage of a dude in a bigfoot costume every once in a while — but if something looked real and moved at a decent framerate, you could assume it was legit.

As this video so kindly reminds us, those days are long over.

I mean, look at that. While some things start to seem a bit “off” in the second or third viewing, there’s some ridiculous camera tracking, lighting, and compositing work at play here. There are also a bunch of tiny but really impressive details in there — note the little bounces from some of the devices after they fall (and how the bounce differs on the carpet versus the tile), and the scattering of the last iPhones to fall at the end of the video.

And just in case you’re starting to think that these guys maybe, just maaaaybe managed to actually track down 10,000 iPhones (hey, that’s only seven million dollars worth!): this video was made by AatmaStudio, the same folks who made that iPhone 5 concept video (the one with the crazy laser keyboard and holograms) that spread around like mad a few years ago, eventually making its way into a Fox 5 New York segment that portrayed it as the real iPhone 5. They admit their trickery right in the video’s description, but that hasn’t stopped a few intense debates from breaking out in their comments.

As for a domino video that probably isn’t fake:

Apple’s primary manufacturing partner Foxconn is said to be increasing its staff, shortly after a freeze on new hires following the holiday season, in order to get ready for a big push come summer when Apple debuts its next iPhone. That’s the latest from the Wall Street Journal, which reported today that Foxconn is adding around 10,000 new assembly line workers a week to its iPhone production facility, with unnamed executives at the company confirming that it’s in preparation for a new iPhone launch.

The Apple partner will begin mass production of the iPhone “very soon,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s sources, which fits perfectly with the anticipated early summer launch of an iPhone 5 successor. We’ve heard previously that manufacturers are preparing for a June 2013 launch, which suggests that we’ll see the device introduced at or around WWDC 2013. Apple has introduced new iPhones at its annual developer’s conference in the past, with the exception of the last two iPhones, which were revealed and put on sale in fall instead.

The Wall Street Journal’s report doesn’t specifically mention a launch window for the iPhone, only that it will begin mass production shortly. We know from watching Apple’s production cycles in the past, however that the company typically starts large-scale production for a launch somewhere between 3 and 4 months ahead of a product going on sale. This time around, Apple is expected to introduce an iPhone 5S-type device according to most early reports, retaining design elements of the iPhone 5 but with under the hood improvements.

Also accompanying a new flagship phone will be a lower-cost offering, which sources including the WSJ suggest could be introduced around the same time as this next-gen model. This would use plastic in its construction, and also come in a variety of different colors, early leaks suggest.

Apple recently launched the iPhone 5 on T-Mobile, which early indications suggest has spurred ample renewed interest in the device. A mid-year upgrade for their flagship smartphone could make this the most successful year yet in terms of iPhone device sales, depending on how attractive any new features introduced are to prospective buyers, especially given the impact a low-cost device might have on pre-paid and emerging markets.

T-Mobile finally began selling the iPhone 5 earlier today, and it seems as though all that pent-up consumer tension has resulted in some promising sales for the carrier.

“Today has been gangbusters for T-Mobile,” CMO Mike Sievert noted to AllThingsD earlier today. Naturally, Sievert wouldn’t discuss just how many iPhones were moved during the course of the day, but he did point out that customers had lined up at “nearly all” of the carrier’s retail outlets.

By now the iPhone 5 is a known quantity so most stores didn’t see the sort of crazy volume that usually goes with an iPhone going on sale — for what it’s worth, our intern Michael only noticed a handful of people waiting in line at a T-Mobile store near our office in New York’s Lower East Side — but it’s heartening to see those customers finally getting a chance to pick up an iPhone without having to switch providers.

This moment has been a long time coming for T-Mobile. For months upon months the carrier bore the ignominious distinction of being the only major wireless provider in the U.S. without access to Apple’s tiny mobile juggernaut. The fact that even prepaid providers like Cricket and Virgin Mobile got to offer the iPhone ahead of T-Mobile was surely cause for some consternation, but the ability to stock iPhones and a dramatic shift in how it handles its rate plans could mean big things for T-Mobile in the months to come.

At least that’s what the company is surely hoping, especially since it posted some disappointing figures in its most recent earnings release — total revenue dipped 5.2 percent year-over-year, while operating income sunk some 25 percent over the same amount of time. Those figures were just released in late February, so it’ll be a while yet before we see what sort of impact the iPhone actually has on T-Mobile’s fortunes.

In the meantime, T-Mobile’s brass has no shortage of other things to concern themselves with. Take the possibility of not one, but two mergers for instance — T-Mo parent company Deutsche Telekom just recently sweetened its offer to MetroPCS shareholders in a bid to make the notion of T-Mobile/MetroPCS tie-up more palatable, and Bloomberg revealed earlier today that Dish Network chairman casually brought up the idea of a potential T-Mobile/Dish merger with Deutsche Telekom.

Before Mailbox was even an officially announced project, and long before it sold to Dropbox in what is said to have been around a $100 million deal, Josh Milas and Alex Obenauer took to Kickstarter to fund their very own reinvention of email. The team created Mail Pilot, which promised “email reimagined,” with the goal of turning email into a task-oriented to-do list to help people truly get things done.

Here we are over a year after the Kickstarter project officially closed its successful funding period, and Mail Pilot is finally ready to debut its iPhone and iPad app to the general public. But it’s a very different one than it was as originally conceived, which, depending on what backers were expecting, may disappoint a few of them. Mail Pilot’s founders, however, believe the new model is better than their old, for backers and new customers alike.

Originally planned as a subscription service that, like Mailbox, used third-party servers to process a user’s email, Mail Pilot took a late game change in direction, announcing last week that it would be dropping the third-party server model and also doing away with subscription fees. Now it’s a one-time purchase for the app itself, and the app communicates directly with your own mail server, without having to route through a second destination. This offers speed and performance improvements, alleviates privacy concerns, and keeps costs down, the founders explained to me in an interview, and as someone who has used both early and later versions of the Mail Pilot beta, I can personally attest to the improvements in general performance.

“Dropping the subscription was conversation that we had had at least once every month since even before we went on to Kickstarter, because we didn’t know whether people would be willing to pay that, and we didn’t think they would be,” Obenauer explained in an interview. “But it was necessary for the server costs and for implementing some of the more advanced features.”

Since launching in beta back in September, Obenauer said that they’ve learned a lot more about what’s possible using just IMAP from the local applications themselves, and they also learned that the majority of users were dead set against having a subscription for something like a mail client, as expected. Also, the privacy implications of using third-party servers to process mail messages made many participants uncomfortable, even with proper encryption and security in place.

The challenge then became reworking the Mail Pilot model to implement its advanced features without the use of a third-party server. Those features involve mostly turning email into a more immediately actionable to-do list, with a checkbox to mark things as complete and send them to archive, the power set them for review at a specific later date or just a day to a few days away with a single swipe, and the ability to create lists out of emails directly.

The app is universal, and retails for $14.99. It’s a bit steep for an iOS title, but Obenauer said that they’ve found it’s what their audience is “willing to pay for an improved email experience.” That it’s more of a productivity app than a simple Gmail client is what helps justify the price, Milas explained, and it is true that apps like Things and OmniFocus are right in that price range.

Mail Pilot’s ditching of subscription fees means that backers who pledged a lot of money for extended service get free copies of the various Mail Pilot apps for life, and the iOS version is just the start. Milas says that a Mac version is on the horizon next, and there are plans for Windows and Android apps to follow down the road. Mail Pilot supports any email service provider with IMAP compatibility.

Mail apps are being acquired faster than they can be built, so I asked Obenauer and Milas whether they’re in this for the long haul or looking for a quick exit. They said they’re best-positioned right now to be able to build the product they want on their own, but anything’s possible.

A new Kickstarter campaign from San Antonio-based Ubertronix, Inc. aims to turn your Android smartphone into a wireless trigger for your DSLR. The project follows others that offer similar devices, but this one, the brainchild of Josiah Leverich, who founded Ubertronix a little over a year ago to build camera remote hardware, has some unique elements, including a way to use your smartphone as a lightning sensor for capturing impressive storm photos.

Ubertronix began as a way for Leverich to build and market his Strike Finder camera trigger product, which is a dedicated piece of hardware that features built-in sensors to help capturing high-speed photography, and lightning specifically. The ShutterBox is an extension of that tech, which features a hot shoe-mounted receiver box that communicates wirelessly with your Android smartphone via Bluetooth. It uses the phone’s built-in sensors for triggering automatic shutter activation, including light sensors for lightning, as well as motion detection for capturing wildlife or other movement-based events.

The ShutterBox can also be used as a standard wireless remote for triggering single shots, time lapse, bursts of exposures and more. It’s even designed to be able to work with multiple slave units for capture across multiple cameras at once, or for triggering remote flashes in a studio setting.

The idea behind ShutterBox is to leverage the devices already in users’ hands instead of making them invest in and learn new proprietary hardware. The ShutterBox receiver will still cost you $199 as a pre-order (or $249 retail), but since a lot of its features are app-based, there’s ample potential for later capability improvements and expansion.

Ubertronix has already manufactured hardware in the past, and has already penned an agreement with a Texas-based company to build the PCBs required for the ShutterBox. It’s got a wide range of camera compatibility, and the startup is only seeking $25,000 in initial funding with an initial target ship date of June 2013. More cameras are coming with Wi-Fi remote functions built-in, like the Canon 6D, but if the ShutterBox can truly leverage smartphone sensors as well as it claims to be able to, that would add considerably to the value of a remote trigger app.

Apple’s trajectory in the U.S. smartphone market over the past little while has been an upwards one, with the company gaining more and more iPhone subscribers every month. During the three-month period covering November 2012 to February 2013, Apple added 8.9 million new iPhone subscribers according to comScore, while Android as a platform in total added only 2.9 million. That means Apple’s share of the total smartphone subscriber base in the U.S. grew to 38.9 percent from 35 percent, while Android’s dropped from 53.7 to 51.7 percent.

ComScore’s figures also show that in terms of smartphone manufacturers, Apple also continues to lead the pack. Its share among OEMs rose 3.9 percentage points during the three month period, while Samsung gained only 1 percent percentage point, rising from 20.3 percent of the U.S. market to 21.3 percent. That means Apple and the iPhone continue to enjoy almost double the smartphone manufacturer share of its next closest rival.

The loser in this case wasn’t either Apple or Samsung, however, both of whom gained subscribers and share, but BlackBerry, which as a platform shed 1.7 million subscribers in the U.S. between November and February. These numbers predate the launch of BB10, however, so we’ll have to watch to see if that helps BlackBerry stem the tide of users leaving.

Of course, both Google and Samsung stand to reap the benefits of upcoming device launches, which could help swing the pendulum back in their favor over the coming months. Samsung is on the verge of debuting its next-generation flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, with pre-orders beginning in just a couple of weeks. The HTC One is also coming to the U.S. market in mid-April, which could give Android as a platform additional firepower in terms of competing with iOS and the iPhone.

Apple’s success to date has been based on the strong performance of the iPhone 5 since launch, and that device seems to continue to be an attractive choice for U.S. subscribers. There still doesn’t appear to be much in the way of a true race for a third platform, however, with Microsoft and BlackBerry either actively losing share or seeing only insignificant gains. The market is now at a crucial juncture in terms of product releases, but the fight looks likely to continue to remain a two-party affair for the foreseeable future.

Udemy launched in 2010 to help students of all ages continue their education through video-based, online courses — and in turn, give teachers (and experts) a way to make a buck by sharing their knowledge with the masses. Capitalizing on the growing interest and buzz around online learning and MOOC platforms pioneered by sites like Khan Academy, Udemy has been on a mission to create the largest online destination for on-demand, online courses.

The popular MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udacity, edX and Khan Academy are all, in one way or another, on a similar mission; so, to differentiate itself, rather than offer classes for free, Udemy offers both free and paid courses, putting it more in the vein of platforms like Skillshare and Lynda.com.

Since raising $12 million in December, Udemy has been looking to continue differentiating itself from the increasingly crowded market for online courses by giving students access to its catalog on the go. Today, the startup released an iOS app — its first native mobile product — in an attempt to make it easy for users to discover and take courses from their smartphones.

The Udemy marketplace is growing fast, and now offers more than 6,000 courses on a range of topics from web development and business to photography, music and fitness. Udemy has added 1,000 courses since December, a big uptick from October, when it added just over 400 courses to its platform.

With its new app, Udemy now allows users to browse and sign up for both free and paid courses, giving them access to video lectures, articles and presentations while on the go. The app also lets students save their courses for offline viewing to peruse during their morning commute, along with the ability to watch video lectures in multiple speeds. Courses in double-time.

Udemy’s iOS apps don’t yet offer the same social elements available in its Web product (those that allow students to interact with their peers, for example), but the founders tell us that these will likely be coming in future updates. In turn, with its iOS app now live, Udemy will look to bring its online learning marketplace to Android, so look for that in the coming months.

Since launching in January, the founders say, over 15,000 additional experts have committed to share courses on Udemy, including familiar names like Dan Rather, George Lucas, and Randal Kleiser.

Since December, Udemy has grown from 400K registered students to over 600K, and a quarter of its approved instructors have pulled in at least $10K by offering paid instruction through Udemy — and some have even pushed into the six-figure range.

Udemy takes 30 percent of those earnings, co-founder Eren Bali told us in December that, over the last nine months, the company has seen steady 20 percent month-over-month growth. Sources also tell us that Udemy has generated over $15 million in total revenue since its launch, which continues to grow. A number Udemy will look to grow as it pushes onto mobile.

For more, find Udemy in the App Store here.

Apple is looking to start production of a new iPhone of “similar” design to the current one during the second quarter of 2013, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The production ramp-up is designed to set the stage for a summer launch of a new flagship iPhone, the report claims, which agrees with information we’ve heard from our own sources recently.

John reported last Thursday that Apple’s manufacturing partners were preparing for a June 2013 launch of the so-called iPhone 5S, a device that retains the design of the iPhone 5 but adds better specs under the hood. This report from the WSJ, paired with analyst claims of a similar timeline for an iPhone product refresh, seem to now all be pointing to a new device in early summer. Apple holds its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference around the same time, so if we’re going to see a public event detailing the new device, that’d be when to look for it.

The WSJ report today also claims that Apple continues to work on a lower-cost iPhone, destined for a launch as early as the second half of 2013. The shell casing is said to be different from the top-end iPhone, which is what we’ve heard before, and the new report also says Apple is looking into different case colors with its less expensive design, another tidbit shared by various analysts.

While it isn’t surprising that Apple would be working on a new iPhone, the timeline for launch is a bit different from what we’d expect now that Apple has released the past couple of devices in the fall instead of the summer. Still, when you start to see multiple sources come together in agreement on information like this, it’s usually a good indication that there’s solid info behind the rumors.

A group of MIT students created an app at a PennApps Hackathon that can do amazing things, connecting multiple iOS devices into a single, interactive screen. The app itself, which doesn’t require any kind of jailbreaking or special access and is currently available in the App Store for free, is impressive enough, but Mosaic has much bigger plans: They’ve also created an SDK to let other developers incorporate similar functionality into their own apps.

The possibilities are immediately attractive. Imagine a board game that spans four iPad minis, one for each player. Or a dungeon-crawling RPG where you build the map by laying iPhones end to end. There are obvious uses too in display advertising and customer-facing terminals and POS applications, but the prospect of interactive apps that can use the multiple iOS devices already residing in many households to add up to something more than just the sum of its parts is what really excites the imagination.

“We’ve talked to a lot of casual developers and there’s a significant amount of interest for things like board games, that’s like the easiest one for everyone to do,” Mosaic co-founder Ishaan Gulrajani explained by way of examples. “Everyone has an iPad, you put them together, and then you have a surface that’s huge enough that you can play board games, or you have something like Angry Birds, where you have the birds on one phone, and then on another the second player can build a structure that the first tries to knock down.”

For tabletop gamers eager for a digital version of Settlers of Catan or Warhammer that accurately recreates the experience of the physical board game, but with the flexibility and added extensibility of digital, the appeal is clear. Mosaic has also been talking to creative agencies, and they’ve observed that people will actually open the app just for the novelty of this new way of interacting with the device. For brands and advertisers, that’s a huge selling point, since it’s a draw for an audience that might otherwise pass something by entirely. For increasing engagement on in-store display advertising, or on branded content, that’s a big plus.

“Brands can do things like ‘Swipe this Starbucks coupon from one phone to another, and you both get a dollar over your next Starbucks purchase,’ for instance,” Gulrajani said. “We have something that’s inherently viral, and we want to be able to leverage that in every way that we can.”

The Mosaic.io app itself, which is designed mainly as a proof-of-concept and sales demonstration tool for the tech behind it, nonetheless offers some useful features for end-users, too. You can instantly get set up sharing photos stored either locally or on Dropbox, and as you can see from my demo photos, the display will update to reflect different orientations when you swipe across screens. You can tell it’s just meant for demo purposes when you use the app, but even the limited functionality is enough to wow anyone watching.

So far, the Mosaic team has tested up to 10 iPhones, and has found that even with that many devices, video latency isn’t a huge issue. The way they achieve that is by using a single synchronized clock across the various devices using clock synchronization algorithms, and while quality will vary depending on the strength of a user’s Internet connection, Gulrajani says it’s “definitely” acceptable for playing back video.

Mosaic is looking to launch initially by connecting with developers eager to use it. They aren’t implementing any kind of queuing system, and are treating requests on a first-come, first-served basis. The startup is bootstrapped, and hopes to remain that way for the foreseeable future, with plans to later charge for API use based on the volume of calls required by developers.